Ok, so, having got on some peoples nerves with all the talk about things that might be intended noob-tube features, I'd like to take a moment to retell the story of CYDSTEPP for the benefit of anyone who cares to read a textwall.

Hear ye, hear ye:

So, as it happens, sometimes earlier in the beta the devs seem to have decided to test out the conversion mechanic, and how far can they take it. The didn't tell us, ofc, but they simply made the CP ammounts on "low-hanging fruit" a bit too good across the board to entice us to try it out and see what we'd do, and what can be done if given copious ammounts of CP readily available. To give you an idea, old Troll Heart used to give 1 HP per level, but had a lower gold price and gave out a whooping 75 CP (If I remember correctly). The old sensation stone gave out 225 CP, more if you combined it with the old alchemist seal which gave you bonus conversion. The sensation stone was an auto-beeline, and coupled with the Dragonshield, seemed almost mandatory to be able to even begging grappling with ye olde power curve.

But it took us ages to even notice the CP goodnes laying about, along with many other things, because the average pro, vet or layabout was going around destroying everything with Tri-Sword wielding CYDSTEPP Rogues. Now, this strat involved scumming, but that seemed ok - most people were taking it for granted as what you're supposed to do in the endgame. It wasn't necessarily the most powerful strat, but it was so dependable if you could scum for CYDSTEP, that, if I remember correctly, intentionaly overbuffed features were not even geting noticed.

Case in point - the first Gaan'Telet, the one before the one before now, was doable with every class. Yes, even the old alpha fighter, but it wasn't doable with the CYDSTEPP Rogue. So it was considered undoable, before one guy, Subanark, simply picked up the old Monk, who people thought of as in need of buffs, and beat it with him. Then it turned out that if you stack enough resists you could beat it with anything - even the Rogue. It took removing the repeatable functionality of CYDSTEPP, and then reworking Drac to stop people from forcing the functionality back into the glyph, for people to venture out of their comfort zone and discover what is actually the game of Desktop Dungeons.

It's a lot like Plato's story of the cave (google it in case you're not familiar, philosophy's your friend) - the world outside turned out to contain many an abusable feature, so much stuff that needed attention and so many things and challenges to discover that parting with that strat was very much worth it. Without the Rogue setting the standard many classes were adjusted and the disparity between them is lower than ever. With the proper understanding of how much such an overpowering strat affected the expirience, Monks could be brought down to everyone else's level (they were stronger than Rogues all along). Vicious dungeons and tricky challenges were adjusted in difficulty to be more doable outside of broken shennanigans and don't force you to cheeze nearly as much as they used to.

A bunch of terminology was discovered too - and gods were understood a great deal better by the players. Regen fighting got some early game love, and Sensation stone isn't hogging too many locker slots. People had a reason to even look at Dodge and Reflex potions, complain about unclear tooltips, and once those were cleared up discover the CYDSTEPPLESS rogue and figure out just how crazy that guy is on his own. Curse was invented, and it works as a res stacking detterent much better than everything before it.

But none of that could happen before the CYDSTEPP took a hit, because too powerful features lead to developing a habit and shaping the outlook of players. And at one point in the development, what it took to see further than Trilings and CYDSTEP ment not unlocking the Warlord on purpose, just so the Trisword and the CYDSTEP don't obscure your vision of everything else - just to see if there is indeed anything else out there.

Anywho - this expirience, of seeing a nerf do so much good for the game, is what assures me that at least some of the things in the game could take them like bosses and not hurt but enrich the overall experience.

I think you may be reading a bit too much into a fairly limited data pool - the couple dozen people who regularly post in the forums, and especially the even smaller number of people who frequently post, are not necessarily representative of the player base and are only a small portion of what the devs are considering.

Most Monk complaints focused around the magic/physical inventory slot system of the time. The monk had highly limited ability to carry items at the time. Once that limit was removed he kinda went insane, though.

Most Monk complaints focused around the magic/physical inventory slot system of the time. The monk had highly limited ability to carry items at the time. Once that limit was removed he kinda went insane, though.

That's just the thing - I beat every dungeon in the alpha with him before I even learned how to play the game. And then I was doing the same in beta, more or less, and I mentioned this here and there but it wasn't getting through. I actually took a pause from the game "untill they fix it" after I got bored, and before I went berserk.

Really, without kidding, he wasn't at all ok even with the inventory system. 50% res both is that good. I didn't even "discover" the CYDSTEPP Rogue because - "why bother with scumming, everything's thoroughly beatable with the Monk, and if it isn't it's definitely too hard". Plus I hated CYDSTEPP related missclicks.

And yeah, god knows what the metrics are... But seeing how the locals took forever (and the fact that the "inventory system" thing is being brought up again just shows it further) to go out of that one comfort spot, I'm not sure I'm completely wrong.

(And I'm sad I don't have the means to demonstrate what the "complained about" monk was capable of. If he still had 50/50 res, I could just use one inventory slot for an item, and the rest for glyphs and still pretty much destroy anything - all you need is blood shield or Taurog armor piece and you're at the 65% cap of yore, and/or whatever ups your damage/attack. Fireball's usefull, Getindare's usefull, the 3 MP Halpmeh's usefull, APHEELSICK's usefull, BYCEPSS is usefull... He was always insane compared to anything sane, and more insane than most insane stuff)

To be fair, I was also running Dragon-shield Paladins alongside Trisword Rogues, and once it became available I was running Burning Heart Bloodmages too (I was using burning before it was cool ). And let's not forget caster-Assassin or the good-old-fashioned Berserker. Rogue was just one of many tools in my toolbox. Also, the original Gaan-Telet was first beaten by the Transmuter, not the Monk, and the very first reported Naga City win was with a thief (only glyph being fireball).

To say that the power of the Monk and Tikki Tooki were under-reported on these forums was entirely correct, but with communities this small you can get those kinds of effects. We did evaluate and discover a wide variety of strategies, and the fact that we missed some important ones is more representative of just how few active forum members we have here than any shortcomings of those members.

Well, true - but this isn't so much about what was found and what was missed - it's about the evaluation of the whole CYDSTEP bussines. Before it could get moved out of the way someone had to decide that "no, this isn't the intended way to play it" or "it's too good" - and that took a sweet while. That particular thing was thought of as baseline - and there are still people sad to see it go. Even though it was horribly, horribly broken!

Things were MEASURED by CYDSTEPP rogue standard, and that was keeping the feedback about the overall difficulty of the game, especially VICIOUS dungeons, waaaaay out of touch with common people. Same thing with old Magma Mines and GG abuse.

And the results of getting that out of the metagame were huge! And positive, as far as I can tell.

(EDIT: The first GT win, with the Transmuter doesn't count because... do I really have to explain this? )

Can you point out who's thinking of the obviously strong stuff as a baseline? Even on the forum? Which is probably a minority of players?

I remember seeing a dungeon of the day threads when I got back to the game. It listed classes by points or such, with Warlords/Rogues being on top, all the way down. Whatever anybodys baseline is, it's probably somewhere close to the middle of their list. I do not think there's an expectation for every class to be as strong as the strongest possible combo.

No, no, not baseline as in vanilla class - but the baseline "strong" strat. There was a great deal of certanty that VICIOUS was supposed to be balanced for CYDSTEP Rogue, and the concept of "way too good" wasn't even there. It's practicaly like expecting the game to be only doable with as much firepower and knowhow to kill SMM at lvl1.